Local Direct

Rebranding Best Practices: 3 Steps to Take Before Making The Leap

Discovery: 3 Crucial Steps to Take Before Launching a Re-brand

As the digital landscape becomes more and more fluid, a strong brand presence is no longer a bonus- it’s a necessity. Whether you’re completely overhauling your brand or giving it a facelift, there are crucial steps to take before allocating a budget for deliverables that ultimately serve no long term purpose.

Successful branding doesn’t happen by chance. It’s carefully thought out, calculated and crafted after extensive research and analysis. And, contrary to popular belief, a rebrand isn’t exclusively a marketing initiative; it’s a business initiative first and foremost. A brand is who a company is; marketing initiatives are what communicate that persona to the world.

For the first segment of our Brand Strategy series, we’ll dive into one, if not the most important element of a great brand strategy: Discovery.

The discovery process dives deep into research and analyzes the results to guide every client-facing move your company makes moving forward. What are your business objectives? Who and where are your customers? What is your competition doing? What are you doing that might be right and what do you need to change? A thorough discovery process should identify and guide the problems you hope to solve in your brand strategy.

Unfortunately, more often than not, SMB’s opt to cut this corner for the sake of saving money but don’t consider the long term value the process provides. Skip this step now and you’ll most definitely pay for it later, so allocate the resources to approach your rebrand with the right ammo. It’s easy to design a new logo or give a website a facelift but if you haven’t identified your touchpoints, who your customers are or how they engage with your brand, your reimaging efforts aren’t going to serve your long term business goals.

At minimum, the discovery process should these three steps:

1. Define SMART Objectives that will ultimately guide your research and strategy.

To make your goals clear and reachable, they should always be:

Specific – Try answering the 5 W’s: who, what, where, when, why. What are you going to do? Why is this important and what do you want to accomplish? How are you going to reach these goals?

Measurable – If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Quantify your goals, whenever possible so you can measure progress and achievement. Numbers and timeframes offer measurements for tracking progress and benchmarks.

Attainable – Avoid the “false hope syndrome” of letting your optimism guide your strategy by blanketing milestones and missing marks. Perhaps the goal is giving your website a facelift – Identify the nuances of this goal and break it down into achievable benchmarks that cumulate to overall success.